There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the lovers’ self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of Donne.
No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing interests, including—as Rutherford had predicted—a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been made on purpose for him…. No later than [p 154] Saturday afternoon—and early at that—Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife’s door, with a spring in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom, and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart, which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him; but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up. The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it for them any more.
In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their brief meetings as girl and youth—she with her weak eyes bandaged, but reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to remain with her, but forcing himself away—and then in long years after, when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming hopelessly blind.
The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the whole of Ada [p 155] Cambridge’s work, and has not been equalled in its kind by any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author’s style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same novel, is conveniently quotable:
It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby’s touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other’s arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed [p 156] the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world.
Though not a satirist—she does not hate well enough to be that—Ada Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing character. Richard Delavel’s first wife was ‘a gentle and complaisant being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense, square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.’ When opposed in will or contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was ‘the evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it difficult to get on with.’ A pattern of order and conscientiousness, ‘governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume, and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,’ she might have made an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel, as he to her.
Still, she was very proud of the look of ‘blood’ in her Richard, and when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in [p 157] Sydney society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a farmer was quite forgotten. ‘Annie might have been a Delavel from the beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to her of the real character of her bringing up…. Years and certain circumstances will often affect a woman’s memory that way—a man somehow manages to keep a better grasp of facts.’
Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was ‘not the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.’
His friend, Major Duff-Scott, ‘an [p 158] ex-officer of dragoons, and a late prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.’